Hollywood On The Tube

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly: 25 Years Of Tv Movies

July 09, 1989|By Ron Miller, Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

It was an unspectacular little chase movie about three kids on the run from mob hit men, but it made TV history 25 years ago by starting a revolutionary genre that has changed the face of the movie industry.

It was called ``See How They Run.`` If you missed it, don`t lose any sleep over it. It didn`t seem all that significant at the time.

Yet ``See How They Run`` was significant, indeed. It was the first made-for-TV movie.

Today, Hollywood makes more movies for TV-about 150 to 175 a year-than it does for theaters and more people see them than see theatrical releases.

Consider these figures: ``Rain Man,`` the Oscar-winning best movie of 1988, grossed $158 million after 20 weeks in theaters. At an average ticket price of $5, it has been seen by about 32 million people.

But the top-rated TV movie of the last season-``The Karen Carpenter Story``-was seen by 40 million people in a single night. If they had paid $5 each instead of seeing it free, the movie would have earned $200 million off that one telecast.

The made-for-TV movie was a concept that originated when the demand by TV for movies exceeded the supply available from the studios. With fewer movies being produced for theaters, the cost of buying TV rights also was rising rapidly.

So, in 1963, NBC embarked on an ambitious program to underwrite a series of low-budget movies made expressly for TV by Universal Pictures. They wouldn`t be blockbusters like ``My Fair Lady,`` ``Becket,`` ``Seven Days in May`` and the others then in production for theaters, but they would have one primary appeal: They`d be first-run on NBC.

At first, NBC and Universal weren`t quite sure what the TV audience would accept. NBC actually rejected the first TV film Universal turned out, ``The Killers,`` because it was too violent for the home audience.

Ironically, that film, which Universal released to theaters instead, now has a cult status all its own and, despite its violence, is frequently seen on TV today.

It was directed by Don Siegel, who went on to launch the ``Dirty Harry``

series with Clint Eastwood in 1971, and starred Lee Marvin, who won the best actor Oscar for ``Cat Ballou,`` which he made the next year.

More important, though, was its villain-Ronald Reagan, in a rare bad-guy role, acting in his last movie before going into politics.

So, instead of ``The Killers,`` NBC began the TV movie era on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1964, with ``See How They Run.``

It was a successful start. ``See How They Run,`` which starred an almost purely TV name-John Forsythe of ``Bachelor Father``-earned a rating of 19.8. With the same rating today, it would have finished in 11th place among the 118 original TV movies the broadcast networks showed this season.

Almost immediately, the other networks and studios began gearing up similar projects. ABC`s ambitious experiment, backed by network boss Leonard Goldenson, a former movie theater executive, actually promised viewers a

``movie-of-the-week.`` That tag stuck and many still refer to made-for-TV movies as ``movies of the week.``

Still, it took a couple of years for the studios to figure out ways to make TV movie production practical and to set up the staffs to grind them out. They didn`t arrive in a flood, but in a trickle.

The first TV movies were mostly potboilers with dusty plots and familiar stars from TV series. Many were remakes of movies made by their studios years earlier. Others were ``backdoor`` pilots for series the studios wanted to make for the networks, among them ``Fame is the Name of the Game`` and

``Ironside.``

The early TV movies were mostly insipid ``B`` pictures that strained to be inoffensive to advertisers and were formatted to appeal to the widest, non- discriminating audience.

When something came along that actually resembled a real, honest-to-goodness movie, the studios often diverted it to theaters instead.

Some early examples of TV movies that went directly to theaters:

``Munster, Go Home`` (1966), a continuation of the popular comedy series about a family of monsters; ``The Shakiest Gun in the West`` (1968), starring Don Knotts in a remake of Bob Hope`s ``The Paleface``; ``The Man`` (1972), starring James Earl Jones as the first black U.S. president; and ``You`ll Like My Mother`` (1972), a slasher film with Patty Duke.

(Some ``classic`` European films also were TV movies in their native countries but went to theaters here, among them Ingmar Bergman`s ``Scenes From a Marriage,`` Louis Malle`s ``Phantom India`` and Federico Fellini`s ``The Clowns.``)

Because the genre was so poorly regarded, movie actors with real box office appeal avoided them on the advice of their agents. Doing a TV movie supposedly lowered their asking price for feature films.

Top directors also steered clear. They disliked the abbreviated shooting schedules and lack of control over the final product, not to mention the low salaries.